Today’s enterprises run on data. Whether your organization is a financial services firm, an energy company, a university, or a healthcare system, you depend on data to understand trends, measure performance, and make decisions.
A no-code application development tool can help. An effective no-code app builder gives you capabilities to both report on and visualize the data you’ve captured in a form or survey, and to track and report on the performance of an application you’ve automated with no-code.
In fact, reporting is among the top reasons organizations are embracing no-code/low-code (NC/LC) application development, according to a TechRepublic survey. The study found that no-code tools are helping businesses automate workflows (17% of respondents), create new applications (15%), speed up development time (15%), and automate data collection and reporting (14%).
How No-code Reporting Works
A no-code app builder enables non-technical users to quickly and easily create online forms and workflow applications. Team members simply drag and drop form or workflow objects onto a virtual canvas to design a user interface, define form behaviors, map a workflow, and build reports – all without coding.
You can then use your no-code tool to create real-time reports and visualizations to analyze data and communicate insights. Simply place the reporting objects onto the canvas and identify the data sources.
The tool allows you to display a wealth of information, including bar charts, pie charts, line graphs, tables, cross-tabulations, gauges, filters, and more. You can instantly drill down into details, all the way to the field that originally collected the data.
Reports enable you to monitor the performance of your no-code workflow processes in real-time, providing complete, end-to-end visibility of the process for key stakeholders. You can also leverage reports to understand data collected through no-code forms and surveys, and summarize data across multiple forms and workflows into a single report for broader visibility. You can even integrate with databases, core systems, and statistical packages that support additional reporting options.
No-code Reporting Advantages
The reporting capabilities in an effective no-code app builder deliver numerous business benefits:
1. Uncover trends and gain new customer and employee insights.
A no-code tool lets you create feedback forms and surveys to gather information about and input from customers or employees. You can gain new insights into employee attitudes and expectations, so you can create policies and implement programs that build engagement and boost productivity. You can also find out from customers and prospects what they’re looking for in products and services, how they view your brand, and how they’re influenced by competitors and market trends.
With no-code reports and visualizations, you can quickly home in on previously unrecognized demands or trends that help you optimize your workforce and build your business.
2. Digitize and automate routine administrative tasks.
No-code empowers you to transform paper-based, manual workloads into streamlined, digitized processes. The team members in your lines of business – the people who understand your operations best – can build their own workflows to get their jobs done faster, easier, and better.
Many of those routine tasks involve reporting and can yield significant benefits. For example, the Vasalia Unified School District in California’s San Joaquin Valley uses a no-code tool to automate a wide range of procedures – everything from substitute-teacher requests to incident reports. The district reduced labor and printing costs, improved record-keeping and reporting, and quickly achieved a positive return on investment (ROI) in no-code.
3. Maintain and demonstrate internal and regulatory compliance.
A no-code tool can allow users to digitize a portion of a workflow for an incremental improvement or encode end-to-end workflows for even greater automation. The resulting workflows can enable data capture, notifications, escalations, reporting, and more. They can even integrate with existing systems to support broader processes and ensure both efficiency and compliance.
For instance, the State of Oregon’s Office of the Long-Term Care Ombudsman (LTCO) ensures the quality of care for residents of 2,500 nursing and assisted-living facilities. The agency uses no-code to reduce errors and accelerate data capture and reporting to state and federal authorities. Reports also give users insights into trending issues, investigator workload, open cases, and more.
4. Support remote and hybrid work strategies.
No-code apps are an effective way to optimize remote work – an increasing requirement for many organizations. No-code tools deliver robust interfaces that make business applications easier to use. They assemble sophisticated workflows that automate and accelerate both internal and customer-facing processes. And they provide secure forms for fast data capture, data sharing, and reporting. These capabilities keep your employees informed and your operations moving – no matter where employees are located.
5. Sustain consistent processes across multiple departments and sites.
No-code empowers you to create electronic workflows that extend across office locations and scale to support even thousands of users. Cross-function workflows address a wide variety of scenarios, from resource requests to incident reports. You can customize workflows to reflect local practices or enforce standardized policies, and automatically centralize reports in corporate systems.
The University of Portland leverages no-code to build forms for use across campus. This enables various departments to meet their own needs for forms and reporting while ensuring consistency across the institution. No-code also supports a centralized data-collection system that both saves time and allows the university to maintain data and reporting standards. Users can manipulate and view reports on the centralized data, leading to further process improvements.
As data grows even more central to business operations and competitive advantage, reports and visualizations will empower more of your employees and business functions. A no-code tool makes reports easier and faster to create and consume – and more likely to help drive your success.
